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There are security reasons your administrator may have for not exposing a data connection. It is not unusual for the system admin to have to define the SQL data source before you can access it and you may have to take steps to firewall the database to address their security concerns. Don’t give up. Work with them. Show them the benefits after you become more comfortable with the tools.

The documentation on the CustomWare Scaffolding and Reporting plugins are improving. My best sources are:

oThere is a lot of reading and piecing things together, but the recipes help.

oMy understanding is that the plugins include the libraries that allow you to access information (Suppliers) using the Reporting macros. The Scaffolding macros allow you to add your own data elements to pages as mentioned before.

oI tend to think of “pages” as “rows” in a database and Scaffolding data as the fields in the rows.

·Google is my best friend I usually search “Confluence <macro name>” or “CustomWare <macro name” and find plenty of references. "Google Confluence tips and tricks" or "Confluence Recipe" or "Confluence How to" and see what other sites are doing. I would expose my tips, but our administrators don't allow anonymous access to the wiki.

The way I learned to use Scaffolding and Reporting was from these sources and trial and error. I had our administrators create a test wiki space for me and then would create sample pages exercising the various macros in a limited capacity using snippets of code samples until I figured out the syntax and relationships. By keeping the examples simple and focused to one set of macros, trying all the parameters, I was able to understand how they work and predict their behavior. In essence I made my own recipes - very basic ones. Then I started building more complex solutions from my more basic snippets.

Some basic tips I learned the hard way:

·Reporting plugin

oSome macros collect data differently and depending on the scope of the query and number of pages involved you may find some reporter macros more efficient than others. I use the local-report macro rather than the content-report macro for this reason. Both work, local-reporter is usually quicker. Keep this in mind if your page rendering seems to take forever.

·Scaffolding plugin

oThe Rich Text editor tends to inject line feeds “\\” into code when accessing pages with Scaffolding data. This changes the wiki markup to a point where the Scaffolding macros may not perform. Removing the extra “\\” allows the macros to work again and the data is still there.

oYour version may behave differently.

·Live templates

oOnce you have working code you can deliver pages with Scaffolding data as live templates. This has the benefit of rendering the page from a template as though it was typed in the wiki page. Updates to the template automatically propagate to all pages using it each time the page is rendered.

§This eliminates having to manually update each Scaffolding pages for code changes.

§Prevents users from editing the code.

§Requires that you have Space Admin access to create the templates or have your administrators create them for you (go for the Space Admin access).

·Start small. Work in steps. Document your methods. Be patient. Plan out what you want to do on paper before beginning coding.

·Review existing articles for similar questions, often I explore the forums for ideas and find tips for things I want to do in unrelated articles where someone is attempting to do something else.

The plugins are very powerful, but require some investment in learning how to use them. The Scaffolding allows embedding data into pages and the Reporting allows reporting that data along with system data via Suppliers. Suppliers are information providers of different types.

An example of how the report-info macro is used to render the system data and time from the Global suppliers.

We are using the Scaffolding and Reporting plugins to collect and report data. The data is generally reported into tables and occasionally rendered as charts. This makes them semi-dynamic - they are updated when the page is rendered.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks for looking into the Excel Function/Formula idea. I was afraid that what you suggested would be true.

Is there a way to import data into Confluence in order for it to be used by Scaffolding and Reporting Macros? I have found very basic and slim documentation on Scaffolding and Reporting Macros. Is there anything of more sustance that describe how to use these Macros?

I would really love to use a data connection into an Oracle Database, but our Nazi Administrator will not let me go that route.

Thanks again,

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Macros like report-info often have parameters like format that you can add to the macro separated by a vertical bar "|" as part of the statement. That is the first example. It is taking a value and controlling the display.

Output from macros's can also be piped to into formatting. You also can pipe it into math functions to modify values of numerics.

An example of this I am using to auto-size Gantt charts is available at: